In the shipping provider and/or manufacturing industry, weight determining technology may have been used to determine the weights of items on a conveyor for the purpose of revenue recovery. Conveyors (alternately herein referred to as “conveyor systems” and/or “conveying systems”) are common pieces of mechanical handling equipment that move materials from one location to another. Many kinds of conveying systems are available, and are used according to the various needs of different industries. Types of conveyor systems, in the prior art, may include (among other things) flexible conveyor systems and heavy duty roller conveyors.
In the prior art, weight determining technology may have included an scale using four load cells arranged at the corners of a solid platform for the determination of item weight. FIGS. 1A and 1B depict plan and side views, respectively, of one such system having a load cell at each corner of the scale wherein the load cells are positioned beneath a conveyor belt. This arrangement of load cells may have calculated item weight by summing and/or averaging the weight determinations from each load cell. Accordingly, this prior art weight determining technology may have only been adapted to determine the weight of a single item, or the average weight of two or more items, at any given time or the weight. In order to determine the weight of a single item, items may have been required to be arranged in a singulated (i.e., single-file or arranged in a single row) and spaced manner (i.e., non-abutting or with sufficient gaps between items so that only one item is on a scale at a given time) with respect to the conveyor's direction of travel. FIG. 2 depicts a plan view of items having a singulated and spaced arrangement.
In a shipping provider and/or manufacturing facility, however, items may, but need not necessarily, be received and/or conveyed in a non-singulated (i.e., not single-file) and/or non-spaced (i.e., abutting of only with very small gaps) arrangement. The non-singulated arrangement may be either with respect to a direction of travel of the conveyor or a direction that is transverse to the direction of travel of the conveyor. FIG. 3 depicts a plan view of items having a non-singulated and non-spaced arrangement. This non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement of items may have presented challenges to previous weight determining technology and attempts to determine item weights may not have yielded useful results for items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement. For example, prior art weight dimensioning technology may not have been able to distinguish between the respective weights of each of the items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement due to the increased likelihood of there being at least two items on the scale at a given time. This may have led to incorrect determination of item weights and/or the production of a weight determining error (e.g., an inability to measure item weight). The need to have a singulated and spaced arrangement may have impaired and/or prevented the ability of a shipping provider, for example, to recover revenue based on the reweighing of items by requiring costly manual intervention and/or additional automation. Shipping provider operations that process a high number of items may have had to sacrifice item weight measurement capability in an effort to achieve targeted clearance times for items. Sacrificing item weight measurement capability may have resulted in a loss of revenue.
As may be appreciated by persons having ordinary skill in the art, shipping providers may, but need not necessarily, base customer charges for delivering an item on the weight of the item. That is to say, shipping providers may apply increasingly greater charges to customer invoices for delivering items having increasingly greater weights. In addition, or alternatively, shipping providers may charge customers a premium to deliver overweight items (i.e., items having a weight that is greater than some threshold value). More specifically, for example, if a shipping provider receives an item for transport that weighs more than the threshold value for which the premium charge may apply, but the customer has declared a weight for the item that is less than the threshold value, then the shipping provider may have difficulty receiving the full payment for shipping the overweight item.
In a disparate, but related, area of prior art, dimension determining technology may have been used to determine the dimensions of items on a conveyor for the purpose of revenue recovery. While previous dimension determining technology may have only been capable of determining individual item dimensions for items in a singulated and spaced arrangement, some of the current dimension determining technology (e.g., CS5200 or CSN210 MassFlow dimensioner offered by Mettler Toledo of Columbus, Ohio) may be capable of determining the dimensions of items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement. The ability to determine the dimensions of items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement may have provided shipping provider and/or manufacturing operations with the capability of processing increased numbers of items without limiting the collection of item dimension information as, for example, the items do not require sorting (i.e., manipulation to achieve a singulated and spaced arrangement) prior to dimension determination. This may have (i) facilitated revenue recovery and/or (ii) reduced the time required to clear items from a facility towards targeted clearance times for items.
Notably, however, with respect to items having a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement, dimensioning technology in the prior art may have been limited by (i) an inability to determine the dimensions of items with respect to a conveyor (ii) an inability to determine the dimensions of items downstream or upstream with respect to the position of the dimension determining apparatus and/or (iii) an inability to interface with weight determining technology to assign dimensions and a weight to single items.
Due to the inability of prior weight determining technology to determine individual weights of items having a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement, it would not have been obvious to combine the weight determining and dimension determining technologies of the prior art. A combination of the prior art technologies would be impractical as, for example, while dimensions of items in non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangements could be determined, the items would require manipulation to achieve a singulated and spaced arrangement to facilitate the determination of individual item weights. Instead, any combination of prior art technologies in the prior art may have used the dimensioning apparatus to confirm whether items were in a singulated and spaced arrangement to facilitate accurate item weight determination.
What may be needed is a system, method, device and/or computer readable medium that overcomes one or more of the limitations associated with the prior art. It may be advantageous to provide a system, method, device and/or computer readable medium which facilitates the determination of item weight for items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement. The ability to measure individual item weight for items in a non-singulated and/or non-spaced arrangement may help to increase the revenue associated with the conveyed items as (i) there is no requirement for the costly manipulation of items, by manual or automated means, to ensure that the items are have a singulated and/or spaced arrangement; and (ii) the accuracy of customer declared weight for each of the items may be audited.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to determine the weight of an item.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to determine the weight of an individual item included amongst a group of items (i.e., an item in a mass flow environment).
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to determine the individual weight for items regardless of their arrangement (i.e., singulated, non-singulated, spaced, and/or non-spaced).
It may also be an object of one aspect of the present invention to physically store, on a computer readable medium, instructions for execution by one or more processors to implement such a system and/or method.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to provide a system, method, device and/or computer readable medium adapted for determining the arrangement of items in a mass flow environment relative to other items.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to provide a system, method, device and/or computer readable medium to facilitate the generation of revenue on an item weight-adjusted basis.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to provide a system, method, device and/or computer readable medium to facilitate the attribution of dimensions and weights for individual items in a singulated, non-singulated, spaced, and/or non-spaced arrangement.
It may be an object of one aspect of the present invention to provide a system, method, device and/or computer readable medium adapted for use in parcel delivery and/or postal applications to facilitate the movement of freight, and/or for use in association with the manufacture of items.
It is an object of the present invention to obviate or mitigate one or more of the aforementioned disadvantages and/or shortcomings associated with the prior art, to provide one of the aforementioned needs or advantages, and/or to achieve one or more of the aforementioned objectives of the invention.